Roxgold can earn a 60% interest in Yaramoko by spending $1.5 million, paying Riverstone $100,000 and issuing Riverstone 360,000 shares over three years.

Roxgold Director Al Fabbro tells ResourceClips.com, “Riverstone had the property in 2007, but they were getting heat from the government for not doing any exploration. They didn’t have anything budgeted for exploring Yaramoko, Bissa West or Solna [three nearby concessions] in the 2010 to 2011 season, and they decided it would be prudent to joint-venture and get other people’s money to spend on these concessions. So we came to a deal with them last year.

We’re very happy with the results we released today. We think they’re exceptional. It’s the first time we’ve seen a grade like this in Burkina—Al Fabbro

“Officially, we’re project operator now, but we agreed they would operate until the end of the drill program, so they’re still actually operating. Once we resume in October or the end of September, we’ll be the operator.

“We don’t have the accounting finished yet, but we’ve made all of our earn-in commitments,” Fabbro adds. “We’ve spent about $1.8 million on Yaramoko. Our commitment was $1.5 million. We’ve made all the cash payments and issued all the shares, so once we get the accounting complete they will have to start contributing 40% of the budget.

“We’re very happy with the results we released today. We think they’re exceptional. It’s the first time we’ve seen a grade like this in Burkina. We know you can expect that in these Greenstone Belts. You get it in Canada; you get it in South America, other parts of Africa. They’re all basically the same geology, so there was no reason why we wouldn’t see it in Burkina too. Burkina is an underexplored country, so I think we’ll see more of these high-grade ore shoots there.”

Fabbro continues, “We like this country; the people are friendly. They’re quite poor, so they appreciate the business. My colleague [President/CEO Robert Sibthorpe] spent a lot of time in Africa, and he says it’s one of the top three countries he’s worked in.

“The infrastructure’s not bad. We can do anything in there. The only problem is the labs are a little taxed; we’re finding a 12-week lag. That’s why we shipped the last batch of core out to Canada.”

Fabbro concludes, “Again, we’re really excited about today’s results. We’ve got more to come; there are another 31 holes in the pipeline, and we think some of them could be as good as the ones we’ve already released. So we’re really anxious to see this go further. It’s very early days in this discovery; we’ve got lots of work to do, and we’re very optimistic.”